


i see you holding your breath (waiting for someone to come rip open your chest)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Multi, but anyway, god what an ep folks!!, inb4 something else happens, injury mention, right?? now that everyone can see it today, that’s. why the rating is the way it is.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23084830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: caduceus is not a particularly strong person.that’s fine, it’s not his job, they’ve got yasha for that, yasha and jester and herself and even fjord, a little, now she and his new mom are getting him in something resembling shape.caduceus is not very strong, but he carries fjord below decks anyway.—she’s seen yasha’s wings before. has been close enough that they’ve scared her, even, in a fight, once or twice. they’re fuckin’ cool— skeletal and black, they match the name, match the whole vibe yasha has going on.except, well. maybe yasha doesn’t want to match the name.(a respite during raise the dead)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Caduceus Clay/Fjord, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Yasha
Comments: 4
Kudos: 162





	i see you holding your breath (waiting for someone to come rip open your chest)

**Author's Note:**

> title from body to flame by lucy dacus— have i used it for a title?? probably, but like. it works, dude, it just works.

caduceus is not a particularly strong person.

that’s fine, it’s not his job, they’ve got yasha for that, yasha and jester and herself and even fjord, a little, now she and his new mom are getting him in something resembling shape.

caduceus is not very strong, but he carries fjord below decks anyway.

fuck, she’s _never_ seen him like this.

there was a hint of it, maybe, before— his lip did this funny downward curl when he was talking to colton and she thought _oh, this must be the one he was talking about._

now, though, his eyebrows are so low over his eyes she can barely see them. it feels weird, to compare caduceus to a horse, but, like, that’s what she keeps thinking of looking at him, like when their horses were angry and their ears went flat back against their heads.

she knows he’s tired, too, but he picks fjord up— not like he weighs nothing, no, like he’s the heaviest thing in the _world_ — and just staggers under him down to the dining room, not letting beau help at all.

he lays fjord out on the table and it rattles the whole frame of it. everyone crowds in at the top of the stairs for a moment until beau waves, dazed, and they come down to circle around him.

caduceus takes a second, breathes like a bellows, like that big fucking bull, and then leans over fjord, careful as anything.

jester presses up against her side, tail sliding cold and slick against her lower back. “i healed orly,” she whispers, mouth and eyes loose and wet with the same damp disbelief. “are you okay?”

“no,” she says back, and doesn’t look down at jester. jester leans against her a little harder until she wraps an arm around her shoulders. “but caduceus is worse.”

and he is, bent over fjord so close their foreheads are almost touching. he keeps moving hair away from fjord’s face, keeps darting his eyes from fjord’s closed ones to the awful color of the burst blood under the skin of his temple from when he’d fallen, to the even awful-er tear in him, from the bottom of his collarbone and down, through ribs, through, well. everything underneath ribs.

he’s not bleeding too much anymore, but it still soaks the table under him.

 _probably won’t be eating in here again for awhile_ , she thinks, and kicks herself for it in her mind’s eye.

“jester,” caduceus finally says, and sweet ioun, he sounds _awful_ , all raspy and wheezing. like a broken person, like—

like someone who’d just carried fjord down a flight of stairs even though his just-revived sister could bend him like a reed the second she got the chance.

“diamond.”

“ _oh_! oh, yeah—“ and jester peels away from her, for a moment, starts rooting through her bag.

she’s bloody, too, beau takes the second to notice— slick and bloody almost up to her elbows, probably from orly. they haven’t looked this bad since they had to fight yasha, too, she thinks.

she risks a glance over at yasha, in that moment, while jester’s digging around for the diamonds, and there’s a look on her face.

they’re _all_ a little frenzied-looking, right now, afraid and staticky, all over, having to just watch caduceus do this with his lips curled into a scowl like they’ve never seen and his ears flat against the sides of his head. yasha, though, she looks terrified, terrified like when she’d stabbed right through beau and into the stone floor of the chantry, terrified like when she’d gone to heal beau and beau had flinched and she’d flinched back.

_guilt_ , she thinks, and she hates that she recognizes it on yasha.

yasha meets her gaze after a moment, eyes swallowed up in that cavernous sort of dread, and then she blinks. _later_ , beau thinks, and it passes between them like one of caleb’s messages before jester’s bloody hands re-emerge from the haversack and she looks away.

jester looks between the two diamonds clutched in her fists for a moment before handing the larger one up to caduceus.

caduceus has always been dangerously polite. she doesn’t remember when caduceus stopped calling caleb mister caleb, mostly because she doesn’t even know if he _did_.

anyway, he doesn’t say thank you.

she doesn’t think jester takes it too hard.

finally, caduceus looks up at all of them. trying to seem like he’s regained his composure, she thinks, but his hands are still shaking where he’s holding the diamond to fjord’s chest.

“this will take a while,” he says. “you all should get some rest.”

—

she waits in the doorway of her and jester’s room until yasha comes by.

“hey.”

“oh,” yasha says, looking her over. “beau. yes.”

“wanna come in? jester’s washing up right now.”

“yes.”

they sit a little ways apart on the edge of the bed. it’s pretty big, as beds she’s shared with jester go, bigger than most inns, almost as big as their shoved-together beds in the xhorhaus.

 _they always crowd together, anyway_ , she thinks. _yasha could probably even fit on it, with both her and jester, if they asked her to stay with them._

“so,” she says, instead. “what’s wrong?”

yasha laughs a little. “you mean, apart from the very big wrong thing?”

“yeah.” she’s deflecting. beau lets her.

“ah.” her fingers dig rivets into the sheets. “i had a dream.”

this sets her on edge. “yeah? like you used to?”

“yes.”

“you don’t think it, uh, had anything to do with—“

“no.”

“oh. okay, uh—“ she doesn’t know how to _do_ this. jester just tells her if she has a funny dream, just rolls on top of her so she can look right in beau’s face, so they’re sharing breath. “what happened?”

“i flew.”

and, fuckin’. that’s new.

“shit, really?”

“yes. i think— i think that’s what i was about to do, before.”

“before.”

yasha looks at her, then, and beau can see she’s crying. silent tears track down her face, bleed somewhere in her lap. “i wasn’t sure i would ever be able to, after that.”

“do you, uh, do you think you could again? or was it just a dream thing?”

“i don’t know,” yasha whispers, and looks away. “i was going to try, when i woke up. but then.”

“oh.”

“i should have,” she says, and the furrows yasha’s dug into the bedsheets deepen, almost to tears. “i could have helped.”

“no, hey, you couldn’t have known—“ she reaches out to put one hand over yasha’s. she doesn’t flinch, but it feels like she does, somehow.

“i did, though. i saw them. my wings, with feathers. i remember how it felt.”

yasha looks at her again, eyes dark with that same weight. “i was scared, if— if i opened them again, and they didn’t have feathers, still, i don’t know what i would have done.”

“oh,” beau says, because she doesn’t have anything else to say to that.

she thinks of something, though, watching yasha’s hands slowly loosen again. “do you want me to check?”

“what?”

“i just meant, uh—“ and she can feel the cold flush creeping up her neck. “you could close your eyes when you open them, so you don’t have to see right away.”

“oh.”

yasha’s quiet for a long moment.

“never mind, it’s, it was—“

“yes.”

“what?”

she finally looks back into yasha’s face.

“i want you to look.”

“uh— okay, i—“

“give me a moment.”

yasha stands up, then, and beau’s hands drop from above them listlessly atop the sheets. she takes a deep breath, so deep it almost looks like it lifts her up.

“okay.”

she closes her eyes, and then they’re just sort of. there.

“oh, _fuck_.”

she’s seen yasha’s wings before. has been close enough that they’ve scared her, even, in a fight, once or twice. they’re fuckin’ _cool_ — skeletal and black, they match the name, match the whole vibe yasha has going on.

except, well. maybe yasha doesn’t want to match the name.

beau’s seen bird skeletons, before, in the archives— she knew yasha’s wings weren’t, like, bats or demons or something. they were bare, underneath all the black smoke, just bare. no long spindly pinions.

she’s got feathers now, though. just for the record. big, snowy-looking off-white ones.

she always thought, you know, yasha would have the wings of something cruel, something big and meant for the wicked winds above mountains, meant for folding for a dive at dizzying speed, towards prey.

but beau’s seen bird wings, before. and wouldn’t you know it, her wings look for all the world like a swan’s.

—

“beau?”

she sounds so nervous.

“yeah.”

“um—“

“they’re there.”

—

yasha spends a long time just looking at herself in the mirror on the back of the door, turning around and around, long enough that she’s still there when jester comes in, face crumpled in the way beau knows to mean that she just wants to curl into beau and stay there for a long time, and her eyes go so wide beau wonders if there might be a white to them, after all.

and, well, jester’s braver than her. always has been, always will be.

“i— they’re so pretty, yasha, oh my _gods_ — can i touch them?”

yasha’s even paler than her wings, pale like bone in the sun, like caleb’s fancy paper before he scribbles all over it. she flushes pink, washed-out pink like early spring flowers, like how cad’s hair is getting now he dyes it less, and nods.

down the hall, caduceus is still bent over fjord, working the life back into him. in half an hour or so, he’ll come around groggily and call them all back, and they’ll all crush fjord between them and he’ll wheeze, still covered in blood but _alive_ , thank the gods, alive, but for now jester just runs her hands along the soft slope of yasha’s wings and beau thinks that she has never seen anything this sacred, before.

**Author's Note:**

> i’m @seafleece on tumblr! come say hi!


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